Back in the saddle…again
May 29th, 2006
I have finally gotten back to working on this site. I migrated my server to Ubuntu Linux which has eased my administrative overhead by a large margin. Never before have I used an operating system that made it so easy to do everything I need to do. Once the server was migrated I decided to take a look into Ruby on Rails. Rails is a web development framework and Ruby is a programming language. Rails seems to be the it thing in web development circles these days, at least on the server end of things. I have to admit that Rails seems like a pretty powerful framework. Nevertheless, I decided against doing any development with it.
You see, there are a couple of drawbacks to using Ruby on Rails. The first, and most daunting (at least from the perspective of someone who is currently or plans to be making their living from web development) is the lack of support from hosting companies. There are few companies that support Ruby on Rails which can be a huge deal if your client already has a web host they like and is not willing to change. The second drawback is the necessity of learning yet another programming language – and Ruby is an eccentric one at that.
Enter CakePHP. CakePHP is another web framework that began life as a port of the Rails framework to the PHP programming language. Luckily, the small band of developers working on Cake are not content to keep it as a mere port and are actively working on adding more features – whether they are found in Rails or not. Cake provides the power of a solid Rails-like framework with the ubiquity and power of the PHP language. I have only been working with Cake for a few days now but I have found it to be absolutely amazing!
So, once again I am going to say that I’ll be making more contributions to this site more often. This time, maybe it’ll even be true.
